Air France Find Could Alter the Future of the Black Box

How excited do you think these guys are viewing the most significant break-through in the investigation into the crash of Air France Flight 447? On the monitors, accident investigators are watching the end of a very long and very expensive phase; recovering the black boxes from the plane that crashed while en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro in June 2009. Two hundred and twenty eight people were killed in the mishap.

Over the weekend, the men saw, via remote camera, a robotic arm fetch the flight data unit of the Honeywell flight data recorder off the ocean floor and drop it into a basket where it was then hauled out of the Atlantic. An activity repeated on Monday with the cockpit voice recorder. I’m just guessing here, but I’m thinkin’ this monumental development nearly two years after the search began, is being greeted with the popping of champagne corks.

The news from the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (let’s just call it the BEA) may may be eclipsed in the headlines, this being the same week the world learned that US special forces in Pakistan killed Osama Bin Laden. So one particular airplane crash may pale in comparison to finally “getting” the man who plotted the use of four airliners to attack American landmarks and kill thousands of people.

While I won’t argue with that, I will chime in with this thought. The mysterious crash of Air France Flight 447 will change commercial aviation significantly. (If I didn’t loath the cliché, I might call it a “paradigm shift”.) But this metamorphosis might not have happened without those years of expensive and frustrating searches for the airplane’s black boxes.

When the flight data capsule produced by Honeywell was finally dredged up from the ocean, BEA investigator Olivier Ferrante, was cautiously optimistic. “Cautiously” because while the black boxes are poked, soaked, baked in a flame and fired from a cannon to earn the moniker “crash survivable memory unit”, the experience of this particular flight recorder has grossly exceeded at least one of the test parameters. Submerged in the Atlantic for 700 days, it has been in the drink, 670 days longer than the salt water submersion survivability test, as described in this March 2010 article in Avionics News.

Now, in possession of the soggy recorders, Ferrante is hopeful that data can be read, even after being in the ocean for so long.

“In previous operations, the same type of recorder was damaged but BEA has always been able to read out and analyze this data,” he said. “We will try to push the limits to read them.”

He must hold on to this hope and he is not alone. After five search efforts and $135 million spent scouring inhospitable terrain and ocean depths, what will be the return on the investment if the data is unusable?

In the days after the crash of Flight 447, I faced what I called the twitter paradox; in which I essentially asked this question, “How can my 16-year old son using his cell phone, know his friends’ every move, while multi-million dollar airliners are unable to transmit critical information?” Turns out I was not the only one asking that question.

At DRS Technologies, executives say before the year is out, they will demonstrate how airliners can compress and encrypt flight information and cockpit communication and transmit this information off the airplane as a continuous stream of data in real time for less money than airlines are now spending on airtime. Money, bandwidth and a lack of necessity are the three persistent arguments I’ve heard against the feasibility of this development.

“We’ve looked at the number of aircraft flying at any one time. We’ve looked at flight profiles as they fly into major hubs. We’ve looked at congestion of transmitted data and the available satellites and we believe it is possible to do this,” Scott Newbold, an executive with a Florida subsidiary of DRS, told me in a phone interview Monday afternoon. Air France Flight 447 and another fatal crash that same month, Yemenia Airway Flight 626 may address the third argument, “Where’s the need?”

I learned about DRS while reporting on the twitter paradox for The New York Times. Then, I was writing about the company’s deployable recorder, a nifty product that encases a recorder in an airfoil so that the entire device flies away from the airplane in a crash and floats if it lands on water. It pings its location and the last known position of the aircraft, through the international search and rescue satellite network. It would have saved the French a bundle, had it been on Air France Flight 447. And in the case of the Yemenia A310, which crashed off the coast of Grand Comore in the Cormoros Islands, June 30, 2009, it could have saved lives. A 14-year old on the flight reported hearing the voices of other passengers as she clung to floating wreckage in the Indian Ocean. But when rescuers finally arrived 13 hours later she was the only one found alive.

“They were 10 miles off the coast, in a normal flight pattern. It wasn’t like they were hundreds of miles off the coast,” said Blake van den Heuvel an executive with DRS.

No airline uses deployable recorders, though. “They’re not mandated so typically what you see in civilian aviation, those things that are not mandated don’t get put on aircraft,” van den Heuvel said.

Crashes like Yemenia where passengers survive the disaster and perish waiting for rescue, may be rare. Cases where recorders have been difficult to find, not so unusual. Over the past 30 years, there have been 26 accidents in which underwater searches were required to recover CVRs or FDRs.

Arnaud Desjardin speaks of onboard data transmission

That little factoid comes from the BEA, which gets us back to the ever-hopeful and I hope the presently-champagne-quaffing investigators. They obviously believe that black box data is a non-redundant system. There’s no backup when the recorders are too hard to find or can never be found, as was the case on three of the airliners flown into buildings on 9/11.

And so while waiting for the day the BEA worried might never come, the investigators started working with DRS, Airbus, satellite manufacturers and dozens of others to come up with new ways to bring airliners into the digital age by giving them the same capabilities as the modern teenager. An airplane that takes its secrets to the bottom of the ocean is a paradox, yes. It can also be an opportunity to push ahead with what’s possible in the future.